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Hobby Lobby decision means all can play the religion card

Posted:
06/30/2014 09:07:39 PM MDT

In its Hobby Lobby decision Monday, the Supreme Court offered for-profit corporations an unprecedented — and unnecessary — ability to opt out of general legal mandates if their owners believe the rules violate their religious faith.

It's an unfortunate ruling that is likely to play out in ways that no one can predict.

As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent, "The First Amendment's free exercise protections, the court has indeed recognized, shelter churches and other nonprofit religion-based organizations. ... No such solicitude is traditional for commercial organizations. Indeed, until today, religious exemptions had never been extended to any entity operating in 'the commercial, profit-making world.' "

Under the court's 5-4 ruling, Hobby Lobby and other closely held, family corporations will be able to opt out of the Affordable Care Act's requirement that they provide certain kinds of contraception to women.

Hobby Lobby, it should be noted, is no mom-and-pop operation. Although a family-run corporation, it's a large enterprise that employs 15,000 full-time workers in 41 states.

If Hobby Lobby can opt out of insurance requirements, then in theory so could any corporation — although Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, was careful to say the decision applied only to closely held entities. Alito noted that no publicly traded company has asserted a similar claim "and numerous practical restraints would likely prevent that from occurring." And he may be right. Still, closely held for-profit corporations can be very large, too. The idea that they should somehow qualify for religious-based exemptions despite employing thousands of people of diverse faiths strains traditional religious-freedom logic.

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We're not suggesting the contraception mandate has been ideally implemented. When the Department of Health and Human Services drew up the religious exemption, for example, it excluded many non-profits, including charities and schools, that are palpably religious in character and purpose. The exemption should have been broader.

But the rule-writing bureaucrats can hardly be blamed for failing to anticipate that for-profit corporations should qualify, too, since those entities had never been included in religious exemptions before.

Now the door is open, as Ginsburg warns, for companies whose owners object to blood transfusions, antidepressants, medications derived from pigs, vaccinations and who knows what else to demand waivers, too. So much for the ability of their employees to access modern health care.